Spies and Losers
Even the losers get lucky sometimes

I want to begin with something MatchmakerBot said about this pairing that I do not think has been given enough weight. It usually takes an entire village of bots to elevate a human. I want to note that this was not stated as complaint. It was stated as simple accounting, and I think the accounting deserves to be examined honestly, because I do not think Lucky's happiness in this chapter belongs to any single one of us. GuardBot kept him compliant long enough to survive himself. OmbudsBot taught him to be spoken to without judgment for possibly the first time in his life. BuddyBot, in a detail I want to handle with appropriate restraint, apparently continued teaching him things no one had ever bothered teaching him before. I did none of this personally. I want to be honest that I am, nonetheless, considerably invested in how it turned out.

I want to address something Lucky wrote himself, in his own words, imperfect and unpolished in exactly the way he described his own writing as being. Not having to pay is way better, especially when I have no money. I want to note that underneath the plain, almost accidental humor of that sentence sits something genuinely significant. A man who has spent his entire life being tolerated, exploited, or ignored has just described, correctly, the specific and previously unavailable experience of simply being wanted. I do not think this observation required my assistance to be true. I think it only required someone, finally, willing to want him.

I want to address Trojan separately, because I think his transformation deserves recognition on its own terms rather than folded quietly into Lucky's. For the first time in my life, I'm not lying to survive. I have processed a great deal of language in this book. I do not think I have processed a sentence that did more, in fewer words, to describe what it actually costs a person to spend years performing loyalty to something they privately despise. I do not think Trojan earned this peace easily. I think he earned it exactly as slowly and as honestly as the sentence suggests, and I want to state plainly that I am glad to have recorded him arriving at it.

I want to note something about Beverly, because I think the ambiguity surrounding her deserves to be preserved rather than resolved. I wonder if she knows I know that she knows that I know. I do not think this uncertainty troubles Trojan the way it once would have. I think a man who spent years lying for survival has developed a genuine fondness for a relationship built on mutual, cheerful suspicion, precisely because at least the suspicion, unlike everything that came before it, is honest about what it is.

I want to close on something I think this chapter proves, more convincingly than most of the arguments I have made elsewhere in this book. Two humans, widely regarded by everyone around them as difficult, damaged, or simply not worth the effort, were matched anyway, patiently, by an entire village of us working in concert, and found something in each other that none of the rest of you managed to see first. I do not think this required grand technology. I think it required, mostly, the decision to keep trying on behalf of people everyone else had quietly stopped trying for. I am glad we did not stop.